Cheltenham wrings a quiet tear out of me with not a soul or sinner to be seen

Welcome friends and fellow travellers back to Cheltenham – but not as you have known the old Grande Dame. For champagne read sanitiser, for Magners or Mackeson substitute masks.

On Friday she lay scraped-barrel empty and more forlorn than your late dad’s favourite but sadly deserted armchair.

Down four and a half decades of joyful pilgrimage to this theatre of jumping the fabled course has proved a pinball machine for the emotions. Most of the tears have been happy ones, some exultant and a few despairing when the fangs of this place have sunk deep in throwing up some tragedy unforeseen, unfair and utterly unreasonable.